Secondaries and sesnsible military planning

Here is you’re scenario. You are a Caldari naval engineer. You’re working on the latest refit of the Navy’s Raven class when suddenly you realize drones/fighters are an actual threat to your ship. You than remember that drones/fighters have always been a threat to your ship… even long before the days of space warfare. And as you sit there pondering, you remember back to your school day education where they talked about Ancient factions and wars when Caldari were still bound to their own planet, you remember the videos of ancient, atmospheric fighters being shot down by defensive guns of water-bound naval ships.
…and you ponder… At what point did naval designers stop using their heads? At one point did some guy say " nah, no need to shoot at those little things attacking us." WHY!?! Is it just you, are you the only one smart enough to realize they SHOULD shoot at the “little things.” Was there some SET OF COSMIC DEITIES THAT TOOK OVER AND FORGOT TO INCLUDE A SIMPLE THING IN THEIR UNIVERSE BECAUSE THEY"VE NEVER WATCHED FOOTAGE OF A REAL WAR BATTLE!!! … But than you calm down. You realize this work schedule is just getting the best of you and jaught down a note on the latest Blueprints – “Secondary weapons to help counter drones?” and you goto bed. :smile: :slight_smile: :smiley:

This is another ‘battleships should have small guns’ thread.

Smartbombs and/or your own drones. The reason battleships don’t have small guns is eve is balanced in a rock-paper-scissors style. Battleships are deliberately weak against small targets. Otherwise everyone would just fly battleships all the time.

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The point I am making is that the game takes place with in a universe where people in that universe are expected to be competent and logical. Therefore, you’d expect them to do everything they can to counter the weaknesses of their ships. Secondary(s) need not play a major roll in combat, but they should be there.

Balance and gameplay trump realism and lore.

I told you, drones and smartbombs.

I disagree. It’s not a choice between either or, you can have both. There are plenty of rational reasons why Secondary(s) aren’t very effective. Drones move slightly too fast for the secondary tracking computers. Drones have sophisticated evasive maneuvers that evade secondary(s) But you should still have them in game because you wouldn’t design a ship without them. In game balance terms: Secondary guns can have a low chance of hitting the drones in the first place, making them not a factor in 97% of engagements.

If the Secondaries aren’t going to be very effective then there’s little point in having them in the first place.

If they are going to be effective then you’ve run directly into the problem Daichi has outlined above, namely that if Battleships can deal with smaller targets effectively without some kind of significant fitting tradeoff then they’re OP and everyone should just fly Battleships.

Adding small guns to larger ships in a balanced way would require completely reworking game balance in Eve Online from the ground up and that’s just not worth the effort. Especially not just so people can draw more erroneous comparisons between Eve ship classes and real life navies.

Why bother with the time and resources? Not only do they have to be designed, they have to be kept up to date and balanced.

If your only reason for this is for the old style naval war theatrics I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. Ships don’t fly in formations, you can’t disable ships by shooting subsystems, there is no boarding actions, space is actually soup, there is an up and a down, celestials don’t orbit, there is no gravity, turrets instantly hit and go through other objects, you cant collide with objects and a thousand other things that are not realistic or in keeping with old style battleships.

Why? Because balance and gameplay trumps realism and lore…

Yes, Yes, I realize. But you’re under selling the value of theatrics. This game is basically a spread sheet editor with space ship graphic, Theatrics is kind of important since it’s 80% of what separates EVE from Excel. CCP does in fact put some time and resources into making things shiny and theatrical. I am not suggesting EVE needs to be realistic. Clearly it is not that kind of a game, How ever what it does need is to be internally consistent. This is a Universe with space militaries and there fore, military planners, designers, etc. A ship designer would find the resources ( in world) worth the time to add secondary(s) because the resources are minimal but the potential outweighs it.

You cant undersell this. It’s a fanboy dream rather than worthwhile game design.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from fitting rapid light launchers to the hardpoints on your Raven. Fit a mix of cruise and light missiles if you choose. Just don’t ask for more hardpoints!

Real world navies support battleships with escorts - you can do that in Eve as well. I knew a player who had an ALT orbit his battleship in a frigate to kill the small stuff. He was happy with the results.

as OP framed it as a lore question, then maybe a lore-type answer will satisfy… chalk it up to the same rationale as camera drones and ship crews. Pretend battleships do have point defense weapons, but also pretend there are microscopic 1 man fighters that you also don’t see, so they cancel each other out. Likewise, pretend all drones are much bigger than you are probably assuming, and thus it requires high powered weapons that require hardpoints to actually do anything to them. Imaginary problems go away easily if you just pretend they do.

this game’s too old to implement something like that, if you wanted to add secondary weapons systems you’d have to change the fitting window, you’d have to balance this system because you have to make it so that it can’t be used as complimentary dps on larger targets after you wipe the drones and tackle frigs off, then you got to think about ranges n junk, and I’d contend all the time they’d spend implementing this one idea they could have came up with and reimplemented WiS.

though I do kinda get where your coming from, BS it technically the largest thing you can freely fly and feel like a boss doing it, (and not have to pay a billion isk to fly it either) but alas, if you want to nail a frigate in your BS, your gonna have to brawl fit with multiple sets of webs, and have a good prop so you can chase down the larger targets. this isn’t guaranteed btw, just how i think you’d have to do it.

Eventually the game will goto 64-bit graphics. A lot of these objections kind of amount to whining. I get it, you guys have no imagination. It’s cool, just stop pretending you do. There is no need to add an entirely new system into the game. Secondary armaments can be entirely fixed to the ship and if you want to add anything to them, you might include a skill that boosts the dismal accuracy of the guns by 2% a level. That would be suitably time sink-y.

–> in basic: Secondary armaments are a passive system that anything bigger than a cruiser would have, which provide it with a chance to deal extra damage to drones that are within say… 2,500M. The systems are fixed to each ship hull. No need for extra modules, no need for extra skills if you didn’t want.

The moment they decided they were no longer Gallente.

Edit: Sorry, I’ve been spending too much time in Intergalactic Summit lately.

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I agree. In the real world, that’s exactly what we would expect.

From a game design perspective, it just leads to power creep, which is not good game design.

So while “EVE is Real”, it’s also really a game and in order for it to be engaging for everyone, it needs to apply good principles of game design, including keeping a lid on power creep.

Why does no one back up their claims :stuck_out_tongue:
"Power creep"
"Unbalanced"
etc.etc.

But no one felt the need to back up how it would over throw the tenuous balance of the universe.
I suspect this is because you don’t know how; but you are offended anyone would want to change something about the perfect game which should obviously stay exactly the way it is, forever and ever.

Or maybe, since you want to be an arse, we thought that you might be intelligent enough to grasp what are simple concepts, without additional support.

However, since you are too lazy to look for info yourself:

So, in summary: if you let all ships creep in power over time, then all missions, anomalies, structures, etc. become easier and easier to complete or destroy.

As things become easier, challenge drops and the game becomes boring.

So to counter that, all those things need to be increased in power as well.

However that would have the effect of making it far more difficult for new players to get into the game, because they would struggle in their relatively weak ships, against the stronger rats, the more difficult missions and smaller groups would struggle to destroy assets the same way they can currently.

Then, at some point, it would be too challenging and again not enjoyable.

In addition, even where the devs try to maintain the balance by continuously rebalancing the existing PvE content, that creates additional dev workload, just to keep existing content interesting. That eats into the time available to develop new content and the game stagnates slightly. Easier to keep creep in check, so that existing content doesn’t need continual rebalancing, then new content expands the options for players.

Power creep significantly affects balance and ruins the experience for everyone because it’s not just one ship being made stronger, everything needs to be made stronger and more difficult to counter the power creep.

Yes,arse, congratulations on knowing the definition of power creep but failing to prove your point.

You haven’t connected HOW secondary armaments create power creep, and no it’s not obvious. Seeing as how there aren’t any specifics in my suggestion… since, you know, I am not a game designer. The claim “this will cause power creep” with out explicitly showing how is just gainsaying. I assumed you’d be intelligent enough to see that with out me having to spell it out. Maybe if I shared a clever youtube link.

There’s no helping idiots.

If you can’t understand, even without specific numbers, that the principle of your suggestion would increase the power of ships, then there isn’t even a basis for discussion.

I don’t necessarily believe you are too stupid that understand, but choose to deliberately not consider the impact at all.

When you fail to consider the effects, it’s easy to dismiss other explanations as not proving anything.

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You have yet to prove a reason why this is needed beyond “It would be cool and this is how things are done in real life” , which make for bad reasons to add something into the game as they do not add any meaningfull gameplay (as you have stated, they would be very weak).